Share This Story!

Scott Walker, Tony Evers clash over plan to comply with federal education law

The state plan outlining how Wisconsin intends to comply with the federal law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act will be submitted to the U.S. Department of Education on Monday, but without Gov. Scott Walker’s signature.

The state plan outlining how Wisconsin intends to comply with the federal law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act will be submitted to the U.S. Department of Education on Monday, but without Gov. Scott Walker’s signature.

“Your bureaucratic proposal does little to challenge the status quo for the benefit of Wisconsin’s students,” Walker said in the letter to Evers, who is also one of his Democratic challengers for the 2018 election.

ESSA, which succeeded No Child Left Behind, is Congress' 2015 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Passed initially as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, it was intended to address inequities in education. And it remains the single largest source of federal funds for education.

The bipartisan ESSA bill has been seen as an improvement over No Child Left Behind, in part because it gives more power to the states over such things as standardized testing and how to address failing schools.

The exact reforms Walker has in mind were not immediately clear. The governor is in South Korea on a trade mission and his spokesman did not offer additional details beyond the letter.

The letter references two innovations in the state of Tennessee, so-called Innovation Zones, which offer additional supports for students and families; and Achievement School Districts, state-run turnaround districts akin to Wisconsin’s Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program.

”I hope you will agree that adding layers of bureaucratic paperwork does little to help low-performing schools,” he says in the letter.

Evers said Wisconsin already has some of the innovations Walker is seeking, including state-funded vouchers for private schools and the Opportunity Schools statute.

He said Tennesse is pulling back on the innovations Walker cites because they have not been effective. And he said the Wisconsin plan gives districts flexibility to draft their own turnaround plans at the local level.

“We believe the best place to innovate is at the local level,” Evers said.

“The state has to come to grips with the fact that vouchers (for private schools) and recovery districts aren’t new things. They have been standard operating procedure in our state for years."

Evers released an early draft of the ESSA plan in April. The 103-page document was, in many ways, an articulation of current policies. However, it did include bold proposals for raising graduation and academic proficiency rates for all students and narrowing achievement gaps — for example, between white and minority students — which are among some of the widest in the nation.

For example, Wisconsin's graduation rate for white students is 92.9% compared with 77.5% for Hispanic and 65% for black students. The math proficiency rate for white students is 48.7%, compared with 21.7% for Hispanic and 10.3% for black students. The plan did not offer details about how those improvements would be achieved.

As school choice advocates suspected, it did not include provisions that would help outside operators — voucher or charter schools, for example — step in to run the lowest-performing 5% of schools. Under the Wisconsin plan, those schools would be targeted for additional support but not taken over by public or private entities.

Evers has been criticized by the conservative public interest law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty for his handling of the ESSA report. WILL has repeatedly threatened to sue Evers over its implementation, saying its provisions are in effect state rules, which must go through the Legislature.